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It was in France, where Talbot apparently did little to enforce his local patent, that the most important technical improvements in the paper negative originated.
One of the leading French experimenters, in stature second only to Daguerre and Niepce, was Louis-Desire Blanquart-Evrard.
Blanquart-Evrard learned the calotype process in 1844.
Three years later he introduced an improved method.
When he first described it he neglected to give Talbot credit for the original invention (Talbot had spent several weeks in Paris in 1843 lecturing on and demonstrating the calotype, but the process was still not well known in France in 1847).
At a meeting of the British Association in June of 1847 Talbot called this an "act of scientific piracy," although he apparently took no legal action against the Frenchman.
Blanquart-Evrard's process was different from Talbot's in that he floated the paper on or immersed it in baths of potassium iodide and then silver nitrate in a way that allowed the chemical.
The compositional style Hill and Adamson achieved in their portraits clearly owes much to the English and Scottish portrait tradition, but it was also a response to the syntactical problems they faced.
The light-sensitive characteristics of the calotype made a certain approach necessary.
All Hill and Adamson's single portraits and groups were taken in direct sunlight.
This was done to keep exposure times reasonable; even so, they were generally at least a minute long.
Because the calotype softened the edges of shadows, and because many of the original prints are now faded, the harsh lighting is not always immediately apparent until you take a more careful look -for instance, at the shadows under the eye¬brows or the shadow of the nose across the upper lip.
When Hill began to work with the calotype he had to learn that its syntax could not accommodate the same range of contrasts that his eyes could.
As he stood before his subjects in the sunlight, he could see separate tones in both the highlights and deep shadows, but the calotype could not.
Its "exposure latitude" was too narrow.
The calotype was slower than the daguerreotype; and, as a general rule in photographic sensitometry, the slower the sensitive material, the narrower its latitude.
The calotype could register tones either in the highlights or in the deep shadows, but not fully in both at the same time.
Hill had to adjust his own vision accordingly, and had to be constantly aware of how the shadows fell on and around his subjects.
Miller was dead wrong in suggesting that the arrangement of the lights and shadows could be the result of a "happy haste.
" Because the narrow latitude of the calotype amplified contrasts, the shadows had to be carefully placed in order not to cut the picture apart with empty areas of darkness.
Sometimes a mirror was used to reflect light back into the shadows.
In his finest work Hill used the harsh contrasts as the key to the structure of the com¬position.
He often placed portrait subjects against a dark background, such as an open door leading into a darkened room, in this way exaggerating the contrast even more but simplifying the composition at the same time.
The contrast threw the highlights into relief, making them seem to emerge from the surrounding darkness.
In view of their tonal qualities it was repeatedly said that Hill and Adamson's calotypes "looked like Rembrandts.
" Given the limitations of the available syntax-mainly its inability to handle both ends of the tonal scale in bright light-that was about the only way they could look.
Pencil Work.
The calotype negative had another artistic advantage over the daguerreotype: It could be altered inconspicuously by pencil shading in order to lighten selected areas in the print.
The texture of the paper effectively hid the evidence.
Hill and Adamson used this capability to adjust the relationship of tonal values, separate figure from ground, accent highlights, add details (Hill once drew in a waterfall), or simply touch out the immobilizing head brace.
They did it far more than is generally realized.
In fact, much of what is usually taken in Hill and Adamson's work as a local fuzziness characteristic of the early paper negative is actually the result of deliberate manipulation.
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